Category Archives: Indiana State Legislature

Hot Air

Do They Follow Or Lead?

The Indy Star tells us this morning the “religious freedom” bill that passed the Indiana House yesterday is “controversial.”

Indy Star

Um, let me correct the equanimous editor who concocted that headline. The bill passed 63-31, which, in political horserace terms, is a goddamned landslide. You see, it’s obvious the entire nation is four-square against this gay marriage stuff and our esteemed statehouse representatives are merely reflecting that will of the people.

I mean, am I right? It couldn’t be that our state legislators are woefully out of touch with the zeitgeist of the 21st Century, could it?

Here in Indiana?

Send Him To Hawaii

As of nine o’clock this AM, Owen V. Johnson has raised only $70 of the $3000 he’s aiming for in his gofundme effort to get to Honolulu. He’s hoping to get there so he can participate in a ceremony noting the 70th anniversary of the death of Indiana’s own Ernie Pyle, the nation’s most famous and beloved combat correspondent during World War II.

Johnson is a retired Indiana University prof. of journalism and is known as the nation’s foremost expert on Pyle. He’s been invited to give the commemoration address at the dedication of a new gravesite for the legendary Hoosier. The only things standing between him and the April ceremony are 4200 or so miles, airfare, hotel accommodations, cab fare once there, and maybe enough scratch for a few decent meals.

Johnson

Owen Johnson

Johnson has set up the crowd funding page to cover his expenses. One of his biggest cheerleaders is City Council member Steve Volan who calls Pyle “one of the greatest Hoosiers who ever lived.”

Pyle, born near Dana, Indiana, in 1900, served in the US Navy Reserve during World War I and attended IU after peace broke out. He studied journalism here and edited the IDS. After graduation, Pyle went to work for the Washington Daily News where he eventually became something of a travel correspondent. His editor there described his writings as having “a Mark Twain quality.” His travel columns eventually were syndicated nationally.

Pyle became a war correspondent in 1942 and, unlike other journalists covering the action, he shunned hanging around the generals and commanders, preferring instead to hunker down in the mud with the grunt soldiers. His focus on the little guys endeared him to the nation’s newspaper readers. In fact, he even suffered what used to be known popularly as “battle fatigue” and was officially termed “war neurosis.” (It’s now called PTSD.) For instance, he wrote of visiting the French town of Falaise immediately after a vicious battle there: “Everything is dead. The men, the machines, the animals — and you alone are left alive.” Historian Rick Atkinson writes of Pyle’s mindset after Paris was retaken in The Guns at Last Light, the third volume of his Liberation Trilogy about the Western European campaign:

Among the Allied casualties was Ernie Pyle. “If I ever was brave, I ain’t any more,” he wrote a friend. “I’m so indifferent to everything I don’t even give a damn that I’m in Paris.” The war had become “a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.” In a final column from Europe, he told his readers, “I have had all I can take for a while. I’ve been 29 months overseas since this war started; have written about seven hundred thousand words about it…. The hurt has finally become too great.”

Pyle recharged his batteries in the US and then went back to covering the war in the Pacific. On the atoll island of Iejima, he was riding with a regiment commander in a Jeep when the vehicle came under fire from a distance machine gun nest. Pyle and the lieutenant colonel jumped into a ditch until the firing stopped. The two peeked over the rim of the ditch and Pyle, smiling, asked the colonel, “Are you alright?” At that moment, he caught a machine gun bullet in the left temple. He was killed instantly. The date was April 18th, 1945.

Pyle

Ernie Pyle

Pyle was buried first at the Army cemetery on Okinawa and then transferred to the National Memorial Cemetery in Honolulu. He was one of the very few civilians awarded the military’s Purple Heart.

If you figure it’s worth it to kick a few dollars into Johnson’s kitty for the trip, do so. Go here.

Make It A Fair Fight

Al Jazeera America reported yesterday that the magnificent African elephant is nearly extinct. The cause? Poachers are killing the creatures for their tusks.

African Elephant

Beauty

As of now, the elephants are just a few decades from disappearing in the wild. The world has lost some 80,000 members of the species to poachers in the last eight years. Man, I wish elephants could fire guns, just so they could have a chance against the bastards.

Boggling The Imagination

The foreign-born Ted Cruz utilizes a secret weapon in his stump speech, according to a BBC online magazine post. He used the word “imagine” some 38 times during his candidacy announcement yesterday at Liberty University in Virginia.

Political reporter Anthony Zurcher writes that Cruz’s speaking style is a “cross between Atticus Finch and Tony Robbins.”

Cruz

Imagine This Man As President

Zurcher cites political strategist Frank Luntz re: “imagine”:

‘Imagine’ is still the most powerful word in the English language because it is inspiring, motivating and has a unique definition for each person. When you want to inspire, imagine is the language vehicle.

In other words, “imagine” conjures up whatever the hell the listener wants to believe. Which pretty much encapsulates the strategy of too many of today’s pols.

Me? I see Cruz as a lot like Robbins and not so much at all like Atticus.

Groupie Nuns

Sounds like a punk band name, no?

A gaggle of cloistered nuns almost knocked Pope Frankie over during his visit to a cathedral in Naples this past weekend. They charged him in an effort to touch, presumably, the hem of his garment.

Pope Francis

Rock Star

On the other hand, one cardinal also in attendance shouted as the nuns surrounded the Pontiff, “They are going to eat him! Sisters! Sisters!”

Can the Catholic church get any psycho-sexually weirder?

Selfie Nonsense

I thought you’d get a kick out of this:

Screen Shot 2015-03-24 at 1.10.45 AM

In the real world that I inhabit, this poor dope would either be sucked out of the cockpit and tumbled to his certain doom or the force of the near 600-mph wind drag would sever him at mid-thorax like a deli slicer cutting through a fresh Genoa salami. That is if he could even get that cockpit window open, which he couldn’t because it’s a pressurized cabin.

The kicker is there are enough people in this mad, mad world who believe this kind of bushwa to constitute, say, an entire political party.

Our World, Take It Or Leave It

From New York University prof and social media marketing guru Peter Shankman:

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The Pencil Today:

THE QUOTE

“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge in every country is the surest basis of public happiness.” — George Washington

OUR GAL VI

The local Facebook-iverse was abuzz last night over the mention of one of our own in the Village Voice.

Seems that those city slickers suddenly have realized that there are actually people out here, and not just goats. And some of us Hoosiers can read and write and — gasp! — think.

State Senator Vi Simpson, top dog of the Democratic caucus, came in for the imprimatur on the Voice’s Scientology blog (golly gee, I didn’t know there was a crying need for such a thing). Writer Tony Ortega breathlessly marvels over the mere existence of Vi, who cleverly introduced an amendment to weaken a Republican bill to get creationism taught in Indiana public schools.

Clever Simpson

Creationism, for those of you who understandably ignore the bleatings of the god-fearing Right, holds that the Earth is only 6000 years old and that a couple of white people named Adam and Eve ate some piece of fruit, causing all subsequent generations of humans to be born evil. Oh, and that a talking snake persuaded them to munch the honeycrisp.

“Go Ahead, Eat It.”

I figure I’d be god-fearing, too, if I believed in a deity that deranged.

See, GOP Senator Dennis Kruse had introduced the original bill, SB 89, presumably because he thinks teaching evolution, biology, and geology are frightful wastes of our education dollars. The Indiana Senate actually passed the bill, leading me to wonder if those city slickers are right — perhaps we are just a bunch of illiterate goats out here.

Hoosier?

Vi Simpson, though, proved at least some of us possess Homo Sapiens sapiens genetic material.

Her amendment called for the teaching of the creation myths of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology as well. Lo and behold, her amendment was passed, probably because, y’know, half to three quarters of those minty-fresh Tea Party legislators probably can’t read anyway.

And the kicker: Simpson received complaints from various minor religion zealots who were put out because their fave fairy tales weren’t included.

“Hey! What About Us?”

In any case, the bill is now watered down enough to make it essentially toothless as well as brainless.

Here’s a hat tip to FB eagle-eyes (and Pencillistas) Michael Redman, Miles Craig, Susan Sandberg, Jim Manion, Steve Johnson, Mike Cagle, R.E. Paris, and Joy Shayne Laughter for catching the Simpson story.

And — huzzah! — those fancy folks from the Big Apple like us, they really like us!

KILL ‘EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT ‘EM OUT

Great. Now some knucklehead with a gun and a teensy package has shot and killed a bald eagle in Morgan County.

The Herald Times reports this morning that the eagle carcass was found earlier this month near Eminence.

Target Practice

Keep in mind that a couple of whooping cranes were gunned down late last year as well. Folks, can we please go back to shooting tin cans off fence posts?

I said this a little more than a year ago, after Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were pumped full of lead in Tucson, and now it looks as though I’ll have to say it again: America, stick your guns up your ass.

LOCAL ARTISTS SHOWCASE

Can you pony up two bucks?

That’s all it costs to see scads of local Bloomington artists show their stuff at — what else? — the Local Artists Showcase, Saturday, February 25, at the Bloomington Convention Center.

Bloom magazine bwana Malcolm Abrams sauntered into the Book Corner the other day in search of baseball magazines — yes, it’s that time of year — and to pass out flyers for the event. Bloom is sponsoring the bash along with Ivy Tech.

Some 67 local painters, scultors, mixed media artists and many others will be on hand.

With tix so cheap, you’ll have plenty of dough left over to buy some nice pieces, no?

CHICKS WITH DISCS

Have you caught Womenspace on WFHB yet?

If not, why not? Great music by a revolving cast of XX-chromosome DJs, including Carolyn VandeWiele, Catharine Rademacher, and Liza Pavelich. Check these Spinitron playlists for the show so you can see what you’ve been missing.

VandeWiele, Rademacher & Pavelich

Womenspace airs every Thursday, 9-11PM. Women spinning women, baby. Catch it.

The Pencil Today:

THE QUOTE

“All war is deception.” Sun Tzu

WINTER WOE

OMG — snow!

Take Cover!

I quote from the NOAA National Weather Service Special Weather Statement issued this morning for our neck of the woods:

… Light snow will impact the morning commute…

Don’t know about you, but I’m about to dash out and stock up on staples.

THE LAW AGAINST LOVE

The Indiana Daily Student carries a story this morning about how the California Supreme Court decision overturning Proposition 8 might affect Hoosier State legislators’ efforts to get an anti-same-sex marriage amendment approved.

One thing that depresses me about the amendment is that it was sponsored by both a Republican and a Democrat.

Sheesh, I can’t even demonize my favorite whipping boys, the GOP, for this.

Criminals (In Some States)

WANNA FIGHT?

So, the boss of Argentina, a woman named Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, rattled her saber yesterday and threatened to snitch to the United Nations if Great Britain continues to beef up its forces in the Falklands.

Kirchner: “Don’t go there, girl!”

You remember the Falklands, don’t you? They’re a godforsaken bunch of rocks sticking out of the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the coast of Argentina. Back in 1982, the UK and Argentina started getting snippy with each other about who should reign over the islands. Next thing the world knew, the two countries commenced a shootin’ war leading to the loss of some 900 human beings’ lives and a bunch of military hardware sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

It’s been said war is hell. I say war is stupid.

Be that as it may, the UK’s Margaret Thatcher got to brag to the planet that her dick was bigger than that of Argentina’s then-capo, Leopoldo Galtieri. Her party, which prior to the war was in a bit of hot water with the British electorate, suddenly became invincible. Her partisans took to calling her The Iron Lady.

Oh, and major — I mean major — defense funding cuts, which had been threatened in the months leading up to the tiff, suddenly were swept off the table, thanks to the war orgasm Brits experienced. Far be it from me to suggest there was any connection between the two events.

Hey, maybe war isn’t so stupid after all.

Oh, Baby, That Was Fantastic — Was It Good For You, Too?

Argentinians were so humiliated by the loss of the war that they tossed old man Galtieri out of office the very next year.

So, here we are, three decades later. The UK is sending its most eligible inbred bachelor, Prince William, and its top warship as well as a nuclear submarine to the Falklands to shore up its already hefty military presence there.

I wonder if the British defense ministry is facing any funding cuts these days.

ROYAL PAIN

I bring up this latest UK/Argentina fuss in light of Queen Elizabeth’s celebration yesterday of the sixtieth anniversary of her ascension to her meaningless post. She was named queen while Winston Churchill, for chrissakes, was still cigar-chomping, gin-guzzling, and flatulating his way around 10 Downing Street.

No, Really, She’s Still Alive

In her honor, I dedicate the song below.

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

No, not the tune you expect. This one.

The Pencil Today:

THE QUOTE

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity — and I’m not sure about the former.” — Albert Einstein

A HEAVENLY PIONEER

Bloomington’s own Camilla Williams, international opera star and professor emeritus at IU, died Sunday. She was 92.

Williams

Williams was thought to be the first black woman to appear with a major US opera company, the New York City Opera in 1946. Her late husband, Charles Beavers, was an attorney for Malcolm X.

MASTER OF MINIMALISM

Philip Glass is 75 today. He is also still very, very cool.

Glass

Do yourself a favor and download the documentary, “Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance.” It is a gloriously beautiful and ugly examination of life on late 20th Century Earth. It has no narrator; no human’s voice is heard throughout. The only sound you’ll hear is Glass’s musical score.

Glass presaged trance music by decades. And the composer certainly influenced Brian Eno, whose ambient forms beginning in the mid-1970s helped save the world from the navel-gazing pap of the likes of Kansas and other uber-pretentious prog rockers.

Eno

Glass may well be the composer music students in the year 2512 revere as they do Bach or Wagner today.

INDIANA: THE SQUARED STATE

Now that the great state o’Indiana is considering teaching the myth of Intelligent Design in our public schools, it’s worth keeping in mind that our fair fiftieth of this holy land once before attempted to throw a caveman’s club into the gears of intellectual progress.

Mental Floss points out that in the 1890s, an Indiana chucklehead by the name of Edward J. Goodwin fantasized that he’d discovered a method to “square the circle,” a long disproved mathematical exercise. Goodwin was convinced that by equating the circle with a square, one could easily find its area.

Part of Goodwin’s fever dream was to jigger with the value of pi, the constant that allows the sane among us to calculate a circle’s area. It was the equivalent of NASA navigators saying, “Aw, what the hell, let’s just call the distance to the moon 240,000 miles — what’s a couple thousand miles one way or another?”

Given that attitude, the mummified corpses of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might today be floating several billion miles outside our Solar System.

Just Point That Thing Toward The Moon, Boys

Goodwin — from the town of Solitude, appropriately enough — told the world in the 1890s that he’d found the secret to squaring the circle. In the grand tradition of many another snake oil salesman, Goodwin was more than willing to let mathematicians and educators use his secret formula — for a price.

But he had a soft spot for Indiana and offered to let Hoosier State schools teach his method for free as long as the state legislature would enact a statute declaring his crackpot idea the real thing.

And guess what — several Indiana House committees studied his equations, including his insistence that pi should be 3.2 (as opposed to the accurate constant 3.141592653589793….) The committees approved Goodwin’s methods and wrote up a bill declaring pi to be 3.2 and the circle, legally, squared.

And then the full House approved the bill unanimously! By the time the nation’s newspapers got hold of this news and began to bray with laughter at Indiana, the state Senate defeated the bill. Even that vote was iffy after a Senate committee passed it onto the floor.

Science and Indiana — I wonder if this is the first time the two words have ever appeared together in print.

GIRL OF MY DREAMS

Another chestnut from my college radio years, by Bram Tchiakovsky.

Pure power pop poetry:

Judy was an American girl/

She came in the morning/

With the US Mail.

Enjoy the soaring melody, goosebump harmony, and bell-ringing rhythm chord progressions.

The Pencil Today:

TODAY’S QUOTE

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” — Louis Brandeis

PENCILLISTAS!

Leave it to that hard working public servant Susan Sandberg to perform, well…, yet another public service. The At-large Bloomington City Council member has coined the term pencillistas for the growing number of slavish daily readers of this column.

Power To The Pencil!

For all you right wing spies and moles who are monitoring these precincts for the inevitable terrorist atrocities that liberalism engenders, we’re gonna save you some time and shoe-leather. Here is a laundry list of our recent activities:

  • We’re drawing up a list of all people who earn more than $500 a week so we can disembowel them when we take over
  • We’re stuffing envelopes full of nuclear secrets and addressing them to the various mullahs of Iran
  • We’re creating a database of kindly old grandmas and grandpas so we can drag them all before our health care death panels
  • We’re establishing a dating registry for all innocent, caucasian, blonde, female high school seniors to connect with black men serving hard time in selected Midwest state prisons
  • We’re working on drafting legislation that would require each woman in the state to undergo at least two abortions by the age of 21
  • We’re lobbying for changing our national anthem from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “L’Internationale
  • And, finally, we’re extremely busy exchanging recipes for scrumptious oatmeal cookies, you know, the ones that aren’t all mushy like store-bought cookies, but sort of crisp and crunchy?

So, if you want to be a Pencillista, sharpen your knives, bone up on your gas centrifuge knowledge, and bring out your best recipe. Welcome one and all!

PIMP MY RIDE OR TWEET MY MIND

Our latest Pencil Poll asked “If you were forced to choose, would you give up your car or your connectivity?”

Our results as of 9:00 this morning indicate the car is still king in these Great United States, Inc.

True Love

Fully 46.15 percent of Americans (based on our findings) would give up their connectivity while 30.77 percent would give up their car. Fewer than eight percent of respondents say they have no car and no respondents say they have no connectivity.

(Our crack team of IT experts cautions that many respondents who lack internet connectivity may have mailed in their votes. We’ll have further results next Monday.)

Finally, 15.38 percent say they have no hope.

Happy Friday!

WHO NEEDS BRAINS?

Now that Indiana statehouse Republicans have squashed those pesky labor unions, they’ve turned their beady, bloodshot eyes toward the even more dire threat of intelligence.

The Indiana Senate Education Committee overwhelmingly approved sending a bill to the full Senate that would allow the teaching of “creation science” in our public schools.

Stop Pulling Out Your Hair — The Indiana Legislature’s Got Your Back

In other education news, Munster high school junior Brittni Pinkston won the regional science fair competition with her project “Angels in Mom’s Attic.” And Gosport eighth-grader Zach St. Peter’s song, “Science: What Is It Good For?” was awarded the Governor’s Medal for Obedient Creativity.

Keep up the great work kids! And remember, a mind is a terrible thing to have.

YOU TWO STOP FIGHTING OR I’M TELLING!

So, the candidates hoping to challenge President Obama in November got together again to tell the world how horrifying things in this holy land would be if certain GOP-ers won the nomination.

And you should have heard them talk about each other.

Moon Newt and Rich Mitt engaged in yet another episode of their pissing contest last night in Jacksonville, Florida. Their bitchiness annoyed Rick Santorum.

Newt: “Am Not.” Mitt: “Are Too.”

The Closet Candidate stomped his foot and demanded that his playmates get along. Or else, I suppose, he’d tell Mom.

In the midst of all the sniping and the holdings-of breath, two or three actual issues were raised: space exploration, for one; and immigration, for another. Perhaps it was the introduction of actual topics that set Santorum off.

I’m Not Fighting.”

Anyway, here’s what he said, after being asked about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and telling the questioner and Florida Republican voters what a stand-up guy he is.

“The bigger issue here is, these two gentlemen, who are out distracting from the most important issues we have, have been playing petty, personal politics. Can we set aside that Newt was a member of Congress and used the skills that he developed as a member of Congress to go out and advise companies? And that’s not the worst thing in the world? And that Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy because he worked hard and he’s going out and working hard? And you guys should leave that alone and focus on the issues.”

Oh, how the crowd cheered our little Pennsylvania queen of the May.

Problem is, those are precisely the most important issues we face in this holy land.

Elected representatives who take their hefty Congressional pensions and then go out and shill and pimp for corporations that have no more concern for you and me than if we were ants on the sidewalk — that’s pressing!

And guys who make millions by turning over companies — and employees and towns and industries be damned? Yeah. Why do you think thousands of people started occupied financial centers and public spaces in October?

Both charges are at the core of our nation’s rot. The continued ability of a precious few to make scads of dough trumps all human concerns. The spending of millions — and even billions — to sway our elected representatives has turned Congress into a cheap dime store.

Those are the issues, Ricky.

SOME SOCIALISTS ARE JUST BETTER CAPITALISTS

Here’s a tale of two Chicagoans. They bookended the 20th Century. In a lot of ways, they defined it.

Each depended on public and private support for their ambitious plans.

First, Jane Addams.

As a young woman, she traveled to Great Britain and saw the Toynbee Hall settlement house. It inspired to her to return to Chicago and start a similar establishment there. She and Ellen Starr leased Charles Hull’s house just north of the famed Maxwell Street area where many immigrant Italians and Jews made their first homes in America.

Hull House Kids

Those immigrants needed help. They were poor, largely uneducated, and many could hardly speak English, if at all.

Addams and Starr opened up what would become known as Hull House. They raised money, made speeches, called for volunteers, and proceeded to provide human services to the community.

They set up a kindergarten, provided medical service, established a night adult education program, staffed an employment bureau, fed the hungry, encouraged kids and adults to create art, set up a circulating library, and started a day care center.

Addams then branched out into consumer affairs and health and food safety. She agitated for women’s suffrage. She also spoke long and loud against militarism.

Eventually, Jane Addams’ Hull House organizations expanded to branches all over the city. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

That all took place in the early part of the past century.

In the latter part of the century, a fellow named Jerry Reinsdorf made himself a few hundred million dollars creating real estate tax shelters.

There is no record of him starting kindergartens, circulating libraries, soup kitchens, or night adult education programs. His passions, apparently, were limited to accumulating more cash than any human could possibly spend in a lifetime. Maybe two. Or even a hundred.

In 1981, he and his limited partnership purchased the Chicago White Sox for $19 million (using borrowed money, natch). Less than a decade later, Reinsdorf and his fellow mobsters stuck a gun in the ribs of Illinois Governor Jim Thompson and demanded a new stadium.

If Thompson refused, Reinsdorf et al warned, they’d take their White Sox and move to Florida.

So Jim Thompson twisted arms in the Illinois state legislature until that august body approved funding for a $167 million playground. The eventual debt service on the new ballpark reputedly brought the final total bill to somewhere in the vicinity of a half a billion dollars. And, despite the fact that taxpayers were footing the bill for his baseball palace, Reinsdorf and his co-conspirators gained control over the sports authority set up to administer the payout.

It was the sweetest deal of Jerry Reinsdorf’s life.

Suite Luxury At US Cellular Field

In 2003, in exchange for $68 million, Reinsdorf allowed the US Cellular outfit to slap its name all over the park.

In the coming 2012 baseball season, Reinsdorf’s White Sox will draw close to three million fans. Full season ticket plans can cost up to $3439 per seat. If you’d like to park your car in the ballpark’s lot, you’ll have fork over an additional $1568.

And we’re not even talking about skybox deals which can range into the high six figures or even the millions annually.

Here’s another similarity between Jerry Reinsdorf and Jane Addams. Reinsdorf’s White Sox figure to be lousy this year. Addams’ Hull House suffered through such a lousy year in 2011 (as well as 2010 and ’09) that the organization is ceasing operation today at 5:00pm.

By the way, the major reason Hull House had three lousy years in a row? The bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008, leading to near-economic depression and fewer charitable donations. Ironic, huh?

You might wonder if real estate tycoon Jerry Reinsdorf is suffering, too. Nah. He got out of the real estate racket years ago, selling his firm for a hundred million dollars. Oh, and his investment in the White Sox? It’s has grown by 16.5 times since his initial outlay of $19 million 30 years ago. The team is now worth $315 million, according to Forbes magazine.

Jane Addams may have been selfless and smart, but she wasn’t smart enough to parlay real estate tax shelters into a fortune.

War: What Is It Good For?

It ain’t nothin’ but a heartbreaker. Friend only to the undertaker.

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